SarahBalfour9's JumboTweets
Sorry, Vegans, But A Herbivorous Diet Won’t Save The Planet
@becci_wright Sorry, vegans, but a herbivorous diet will NOT save the planet #vegan
Vegans love to argue that their diet and lifestyle is morally, ethically and environmentally superior, that it is ‘evil’ carnivores who are responsible for global warming and climate change but, because they believe themselves to be morally superior, they never stop to think of the impact their own diet and lifestyle is having on the environment and climate. It’s very easy to spot a vegan in the wild, because they never miss an opportunity to advertise the fact on social media.
The very first issue is, of course, is that veganism puts humans ‘above’ animals, vegans do not think of Homo sapiens as an animal, it’s ‘us and them’. This is, of course, utterly nonsensical, of course we’re animals, we’re apes. Okay, that’s a rather overgeneralisation, I have met vegans that do acknowledge we’re animals, but they then go on to argue that, because every other species of Great Ape is ‘vegan’, that is ‘proof’ that humans shouldn’t be eating other species. There’s just one small flaw in this argument - every other species of Great Ape DOES eat meat; chimpanzees hunt colobus monkeys, and have even been known to engage in cannibalism; orangutans have been filmed fashioning sticks into spears and using them to catch fish; bonobos eat eggs and chicks, as do gorillas, and every species eats insects. These are uncomfortable facts, but facts they most assuredly are.
The second argument put forward by vegans is that humans are omnivores and can eat anything; this is very true, we are omnivores but, just because we can eat anything, doesn’t mean we should. Every omnivorous species must eat meat to be healthy. This is an irrefutable physiological fact, omnivores lack the correct enzymes for extracting nutrients from plants because, all omnivorous species are basically carnivores which have added plants to their diets over time (even pandas still have the physiology of carnivores and, due to this, they cannot extract much nutrition and energy from bamboo, which is why they only have one shot at reproduction every couple of years), and humans are no different, and diet and physiology-wise we are really most similar to bears (although not all bears are omnivorous, of course; a polar bear is, of course, solely carnivorous, and sloth bears eat mainly fruit, ants and termites), I’m referring to brown bears, whose diet is comprised of at least 90% meat and fish. Could a brown bear survive on nothing but berries, if it could find enough of them…? Sure, it could, but would it be healthy…? Most certainly not.
And thus it is the same for humans - there is a reason that those countries where people can’t afford to eat meat are those where malnutrition is endemic; they have no choice but to eat a plant-based diet, but the lack of nutrients eventually kills them. It is only in the affluent West we can afford to adopt such an unhealthy diet because we can simply pop supplement pills to counter malnutrition (and, I would therefore, argue that any diet which requires supplementation isn’t healthy).
Thirdly, in the practice of agriculture it is impossible to not cause endless suffering to many living creatures. One could argue that the most suffering of all is caused by annual agriculture, the cultivation of vegetables, including grains, beans, and rice, that only take one year to grow from seed to food. We displace countless wild animals from their homes and lands when we cultivate annual crops. Not only that, we also kill thousands of creatures when we till the soil.
A perennial agriculture, on the other hand, based on trees, shrubs, and livestock, allows nature to thrive.
Fourth, vegans never seem to think about the effect their diet and lifestyle has on global biodiversity;... <<<<<< N.B from Jumbotweet: auto-truncated at 4K characters on index page - Click here or on the "view" link to see entire jumbotweet! http://www.jumbotweet.com/ltweets/view/181765